Posts tagged digital governance

All organisations – not just publishers – have to actively manage their content throughout its lifecycle.

But what are the implications, in this digital age, if you need to update, amend or even withdraw something that has been published but then repurposed and reused in a myriad different ways by a whole host of third parties?

Imagine it’s Friday morning and the head office of Wonderful Widgets Ltd is abuzz with the news that their new social media marketing campaign has been taken to task by the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA)…

Their claim to be the ‘Best Widget For Bringing About World Peace’ was disputed by a retired Colonel in Chichester and the complaint has been upheld by an ASA Adjudication.

Clumps of hair are being torn out by various members of the marketing team and at their social media agency, Wondiferous, as the claim is embedded in a rather smart video ad directed by someone who once shared a cab with Steven Spielberg, as well as featuring in an app that is proving a rather popular download.

There’s no choice by to take down the video and withdraw the app while changes are made. Somebody also remembers to take down the press release about the campaign.

(Nobody has remembered that a picture from the campaign and some accompanying text – including the offending statement – had been sent off to the team who were preparing the company’s annual report, which will go off to the printers in 40 minutes time.)

The claim has also been used in various articles and sound bits over the last few weeks but nobody is entirely sure where or who to contact next.

How do you take stuff back?

In today’s digital age trying to recant content is a bit like smashing a cafeteire full of coffee and trying to get all the spashes back in the jug.

What steps should an organisation take to recall content that has been appropriated, misappropriated, atomised, reused, abused, reedited, retweeted, shared, pinged and generally tossed upon the winds of social media and other forms of digital transmission or syndication and now resides in multiple locations around the virtual globe?

Chances are that, in the case above, reasonable effort will be enough. But what if the offending material is now deemed defamatory and the subject of litigation, or has been found to contain an inaccuracy that could be physically harmful – a decimal point missing on a data safety sheet, or in the appropriate dosage for a new drug? What efforts must you go to to get take that back?

The fact is we’re all publishers now. And as such corporate vulnerabilities are no different from those in magazine and newspaper organisations. As some of you know, I regard the successful Lord McAlpine pursuit of libel damages from high profile tweeters towards the end of last year as evidence of this paradigm shift.

Smart traditional publishers are reviewing their Ts & cs to put the emphasis on syndication partners being responsible for policing the content they purchase and reuse. Smart corporates may want to look at their own Ts & Cs in this light.

Google cached files

There is also the whole issue around Google cached files, that can linger long after the baseline content has been removed or updated. You can ask Google to remove pages from its cache. I certainly think being able to evidence that you have done this in a very timely fashion is good practice.

Best efforts

Organisations also need to demonstrate that the have made every effort to expunge or recall something. In my book the first way you evidence this is that you know where content has gone in the first place, or at least its departing point. So, for example, the press office in the scenario above really should have a shared written knowledge of the annual report usage. Relying on memory is not good governance.

The Doomsday Clock is maintained by scientists as a visual representation of how close we’re come to nuclear Armageddon. It currently stands at five minutes to midnight and it swings a minute or two in either direction depending on what’s happening in the world.

Scientists pushed it one minute closer to midnight on January 10, 2012, reflecting their decreasing confidence in global leaders to get on with each other. It was last pushed away from midnight back in 2007. It’s worth reviewing the clock timeline where you have a few minutes. The impact is… sobering. Doomsday Clock Timeline

I’ve come to the conclusion that those involved in content and its delivery need their own Doomsday Clock.

It needs to be broader than just a Digital Doomsday timepiece and if I call it the Information Doomsday Clock, people will just tell me to take more water with it.

Maybe I should start by describing what my Doomsday vision (nightmare) looks like. See if it’s sobering enough for you…

It’s a few years in the future

Digital content has been locked down due to the impact of increasingly onerous legislation that runs to hundreds of pages and has titles such as the Universal Information Storage & Transmission Protection & Security Act.

The prices of newspapers, magazines, books, pay per view (including on demand television), online news and resources have increased substantially.

This is because prices contain a corporate and public libel defamation insurance premium component designed to cover both the publisher and the consumer. (But as this has never been tested in the courts nobody’s sure if it will work or not.) This premium is referred to in the popular media as ‘the McAlpine tax’. Free to view and free to publish are almost unheard of for this reason. 70% of bloggers have ceased to blog.

As part of any job application process you have to list any online media you subscribe to including personal Twitter and Facebook feeds.

You have to sign a liability clause in your contract of employment indemnifying your employer against claims made against you as ‘publisher in person’ the new technical definition of anybody who uses media of any form to disseminate information of any type to known or unknown audiences, either directly or indirectly, personally or professionally, through intent or omission, with or without malice... The actual clause is much, much longer, obviously.

Accessing social media at work, or referring to employers or colleagues in posts, results in verbal and then written warnings being issued and can quickly lead to dismissal.

Most companies have ceased to use social media in a business context. Instead, nearly all marketing is handled via formal announcements published on LinkedIn Lite.

The storage capacity of computers and other hand-held devices is also limited by law and they have to be licensed.

When children are born they’re given a pre-set terabytage of cloud storage and a unique identification number which they keep all their lives.

The security encryption on cloud storage is significant but designated government authorities have the right to go in and review what you hold under the Virtual Criminal Activity & Anti Social Intent Pre-Offence Initiative Regulations.

I could go on but I’m feeling depressed now.

This is a joke, right?

The definition of a joke is something said or done to evoke laughter or amusement. Me? I’m just adjusting the hands on my new clock. It’s currently set at 3 minutes to midnight.

When scientists move the hands on the Doomsday Clock they’re hoping to scare the powers that be into getting to grips with the state of the world and make some changes. If the world explodes it won’t actually be because of a nuclear bomb but because President this and Prime Minister that failed to get round a table and sign up to some workable solutions.

I feel the same way about content (words, images, audio, print…). Forces are marshalling and what we don’t control, risk rate and mitigate these forces will prohibit or bind tightly in red tape.

What’s getting to me currently is that we’re addressing things in silos. Online over there. Offline over here. Governance in this jar. Content creation in that one. Financial compliance governed by this logic. Content compliance by that. In the meantime someone in IT is turning off your firewall so they can work on problems from their home computer (this one actually happened).

It’s not all bad. Yesterday I had a chance to peek inside one major news organisation and was blown away (possibly a bad choice of words, but you know what I mean), by how cutting edge their content governance is.

So here’s the thing. Let’s all start working on organisationally cohesive strategies that take in everything, including the user as publisher. For that I’ll take a good 10 minutes of the clock.

Back in the days of the wild, wild, west, gun fighters and bank robbers ran amok. Gentle folk were afraid for the lives and street brawls were commonplace. Okay, it was exciting, but reputable companies – I mean folks – stayed in the big cities and left the frontier towns to the lawless.

Aw shucks, it’s another metaphor.

The good thing about all those gunslingers and rot gut whiskey drinkers was they opened up opportunities. It was their all round recklessness that pushed the boundaries. But before these new opportunities could be truly capitalised on, somebody had to impose order.

Enter the sheriff…

The sheriff slung the drunks in jail and ran the gunslingers out of town. Sheriffs were also pretty handy with guns themselves. Not a few gunslingers were hired by towns to police their streets and gun down the ‘bad guys’. In fact, apart from the presence of the sheriff’s 5-pointed star, very little differentiated the law man from the lawless.

So, when you’re policing the streets, where do you draw the line? Okay, we’re ditching the metaphor now.

In terms of rolling out the concept of digital governance to wider audiences, I’ve chosen legislation and regulation as my entry point*. This is because, in lawful societies, the risk of legal penalty is a sufficient deterrent (particularly if you’re a big company with a lot to lose). It’s also something that attracts the attention of the board room, which, sorry, content per se does not

But when you seriously consider what could impact on the correct governance and risk mitigation of digital content, you begin widening your scope – quite considerably.

For example, culture secretary, Jeremy Hunt, plans to publish a Green Paper setting out the scope of a new communications act by the end of this year. If you think this is just about hacking and tabloids, think again – and read the below…

Hunt gave a few clues as to areas on which he may focus, but appeared to indicate that one may be regulation of programming content on the internet.

Under the current EU Audiovisual Media Services Directive, “TV like” services, such as the BBC iPlayer, are subject to regulation. However, the level of regulation is less than that imposed upon traditional TV channels.

“Whether we are watching a broadcast live or through catchup TV services, via a TV or a computer, it is the content that matters, rather than the delivery mechanism,” said Hunt. “So should it be the case that the method of delivery has a significant impact on the method of regulation? Or should we be looking at a more platform-neutral approach?”

There’s data protection and eprivacy and the implications of the European Data Protection Framework (EDPF) Review (don’t ask me, I’m new here) and the Digital Economies Act; some might say the latter was rushed legislation aimed at pirate downloaders and which now seems to be languishing somewhere in Brussels. PRS for Music, which brings together the two royalty collection societies MCPS and PRS, is also looking at the whole area internet piracy and controlling copyright online.

Plus:

The EUs general concerns and overall remit around data protection and how personal data is used.

The ongoing digital implications for copyright and its infringement including ideas floated by the Hargreaves Review.

The impact of changes to internet protocols.

Then there’s the whole area of cyber security , the Government’s plans for a cyber security strategy, the implications of the Home Affairs Committee inquiry following last year’s riots, a warning from head of GCHQ’s about a ‘disturbing’ level of cyber attacks, as well as high-profile security breaches involving big names such as PlayStation and Google.

It’s not that organisations and governments are not increasingly on their toes when it comes to critical issues such as hacking and data protection. As early as its 2008-2009 report, the UK’s Intelligence and Security Committee raised concerns about the potential threat posed by cuber crime, not only to the UK government, but also ‘critical national infrastructure and commercial companies’.

We therefore welcome the fact that this threat has been recognised and that cyber security is now listed as a Tier One national security risk. The new funding that has been made available, as part of the SDSR (Strategic Defence and Security Review), to fund cyber security work is a significant step forward.

Source: 2010–2011 Annual Report, Intelligence and Security Committee

All fine and dandy. But its the next bit of their latest report which attracts my interest…

Whilst the priority and funding are to be welcomed, structural issues continue to cause us concern. We have noted 18 units with particular responsibilities in this field across the three Agencies, two law enforcement bodies and five government departments. Between them they cover policy, management, intelligence operations, protective advice, detection and analysis, with some focused on crime, some on hostile activity from overseas, some on Counter-Terrorism and others covering all three. This risks duplication and confusion and cannot be cost-effective. We therefore recommend that work be done to rationalise the existing structures.

Source: 2010–2011 Annual Report, Intelligence and Security Committee

Some 18 different agencies all getting their head around cyber security. Cooks? Broth? Anybody?

I think there is a real danger that as the digital wild west becomes the tamed west that we could end up in a situation where the streets are populated by too many sherif’s, firing off their six guns for offences no more horrendous than jaywalking. I’ve read the phrase ‘governing the internet’ more than once and frankly it worries me. Didn’t Canute try something similar?

But it’s not all bad news…

After the gun and the guns for hire, and the early day sheriffs who relied on their quick draw, there came judiciary and laws than formalised the processes for identifying bad from good and exacting appropriate penalties. That’s where I think we now need to go with digital governance.

Those of us involved in content, its creation and implementation are ideally placed to step into and exert our influence in this area. I used the word ‘influence’ rather than, say, ‘control’, after careful thought. Think traffic police rather than Big Brother. It’s all about enabling the flow of communication while mitigating the risk of pile ups.

We already act as the linchpin for a whole range of disciplines. The image below was created by Richard Ingram and is one of many of his stunning visualisations that go towards explaining our turnkey positioning.

• We already have, and continuing to improve, a range of tools and methodologies that allow us to guide clients in project choice, rationale, implications and implementation.

• This is alongside the deploying of the actual content itself across an increasing array of channels and delivery mechanisms.

• To this array of tools and services we ‘simply’ need to add governance tools and methodologies, such as a suitable content risk matrix that will allow us to identify the more important issues that clients need to address – and mitigate.

I’m going to show you what that content risk matrix might look like in my next blog.